1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method and a program for the generation of print data, according to a drawing command input from outside, and particularly relates to an image processing apparatus, an image processing method and a program that performs correction of the drawing command to improve the reproducibility of a line figure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there are known image processing devices that perform image formation that corresponds to input electronic data by a printer engine which uses toner or ink. These kinds of image processing devices have a problem that an extremely small figure with a closed area such as a thin line or the like cannot be reproduced as intended by the electronic data due to the characteristics of the printer engine. For example, in an electrophotographic process that forms an image by fixing a latent image, which corresponds to a page image, by toner on a sheet, if the area of a closed region that forms a figure is small, the adhesion-amount-of-toner tends to be small. Consequently, a closed region with a small area may be expressed comparatively thin. Herein, an arrangement is made, in general, such that data described by a page description language (hereinafter, referred to as PDL) including drawing commands, such as lines, characters and images, is received as the input electronic data and analyzed so as to generate the page image.
As a related art to solve the problem, a print control device is presented that is provided with a UI (user interface) capable of designating the amount of thickening of a thin line to control the width of thickening correspondingly to the color hue of the thin line and the contrast with the background color (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-105827).
In the related art (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-105827), a thickening process is realized by determining whether or not to thicken a line for a line drawing command to adjust the line width. However, line figures expressed by a fill figure (closed region fill command), such as a rectangular fill figure other than a line drawing command, are not considered. Accordingly, there is a problem that a thickening process is not applied to line figures which have been drawn by application software without using a line drawing command.
Further, in the related art (Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2009-105827), although a thickening width is arranged correspondingly to the contrast with a background and the like, problems with drawing by thickening, for example, in a case that line figures are adjacent to each other, are not particularly taken into account.
Herein, the drawing command, as described above, refers to a drawing object with attributes, such as coordinate values representing a start point and an endpoint, a line width, a color, the shape at the ends of a line, and the like. A line drawing command is, in general, also called line drawing or stroke drawing. Further, the fill figure (closed region fill command), as described above, refers to a drawing object that is defined as a figure (fill figure) whose closed inner region represented by a plurality of coordinate points or the like is filled with a designated color. Typical examples of fill figures include rectangles (quadrilaterals), polygons, circles, ellipses, and the like.